Todorov warns that these impressions are highly inaccurate. People have many biases, including halo effects – where we assume one positive trait will be followed by others – and stereotypes – where we associate behaviors with looks. Still, the professor says it’s worth understanding them, if only to fight them.

We’ve highlighted some findings from Todorov and others below.

We assume more attractive people rate higher in other positive traits, too, perceiving them as more competent, intelligent, trustworthy, and more.

Perceived trustworthiness increases from left to right. Associated traits include feminine features and resemblance to a smile.

You can see how one face can be digitally manipulated to look more or less neurotic, extraverted, and more in the images below from a study by Mirella Walker and Thomas Vetter at the University of Basel.

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Research by Mirella Walker and others (compiled by Mike Nudelman)

Source: Walker, Mirella and Thomas Vetter 2016, “Faced with exclusion: Perceived facial warmth and competence influence moral judgments of social exclusion” in “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology”

Another type of facial bias: more typical faces are viewed as more trustworthy. This bias contributes to racism and xenophobia.

People also react more positively to faces that resemble their own. This was tested by having people evaluate the trustworthiness of morphed faces containing varying percentages of their own face.

Troublingly, people also judge criminality and remorsefulness based on faces, as both Todorov and Walker have shown. Perceived criminality increases from left to right in the top two rows; perceived remorsefulness in the bottom two.

What’s wrong with facial bias?

Although the face can give some clues to behavior, Todorov argues that people tend to imagine false insights or overemphasize real ones, when they would be better off consulting other information. Also links between facial morphology and behavior may only be the result of societal bias, where people act a certain way because we expect them do, and facial bias just reinforces these stereotypes.